Indeed. Google may or may not be evil, but they are definitely not philanthropic. Everything they do is motivated by what they can make in return (ad revenue). They are not out to change the world and make it a better place, although that may be a nice side effect of how they try to run their business.
For example, before Google, there were free, limited email services and then there were paid ones. Accounts were limited to 10, 50, 100 megs of email space, and if you exceeded that, you were expected to pay a yearly fee to maintain your space. Then came Gmail with its unprecedented 1000 megs "and growing". And it was all free! Of course everyone flocked to them (and the competitors like Yahoo and Hotmail and, yes, .Mac/MobileMe, started increasing their space too). Did Google do this because they were tired of the big, bad corporations taking advantage of poor customers? No, this was designed to get masses to switch over, and all that storage space means we never delete our emails, which makes it all the better to data mine from to show targeted advertising. There wasn't even any way to delete emails in the first iteration of Gmail.
It's beginning to get scary though. Google knows every site I browse (Chrome), my search habits (of course), what I email (Gmail), what I write (Documents), who my friends are (GTalk), what videos I watch (YouTube), what I take photos of (Picasa), my daily schedule (Calendar), where I live and where I want to go (Maps), what I blog (Blogger), what I buy, including my address and credit card details (Checkout)...
With all that information at their disposal, I had better hope that showing me ads is all that they're interested in doing!